COMING HOME, by Brittney Griner with Michelle Burford
If you weren’t following women’s basketball, you probably hadn’t heard of Brittney Griner when she was arrested at a Moscow-area airport in February 2022. But she was a bona fide superstar — an Olympic gold medalist, a W.N.B.A. All-Star and the linchpin of her team, the Phoenix Mercury.
When she was detained, she was traveling to her $1 million off-season job with UMMC Yekaterinburg, a top team in the wildly popular Russian women’s basketball league where she had played for seven years, in part to supplement her $220,000 salary with the Mercury. Her crime: possessing 0.7 grams of medicinal marijuana oil — legally prescribed in the United States — that she had forgotten to remove from her bag.
“Fear is one thing,” Griner writes in “Coming Home,” her new memoir, describing the stomach-curdling moment when an inspector seized her passport and told her to wait. “But uncertainty, the unknown, a free fall into mystery — that’s much stronger than fear; it’s terror.”
At first, Griner naïvely thought she would be fined and sentenced to house arrest. But possession of even a small amount of drugs is a serious offense in Russia, and she was eventually charged with narcotics smuggling. Days later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Griner found herself a high-profile pawn in a vicious geopolitical battle.
“Coming Home” is a visceral, harrowing account of what it’s like to be trapped inside Russia’s infamous criminal justice system, with its merciless judges and vast labor camps.
